But strangest thing of all—because, where could she have obtained the knowledge?—Eppie was always to be found handy in houses where little caps and small-waisted frocks and many other mysteries began to appear, without any visible little heads or small waists on which to fit them.
Poor John! it was on such occasions as those, and I am proud to add only, that he had to be content with a cold dinner or a bowl of hasty pudding made by his own hands. But he never grumbled.
CHAPTER X
LIFE AT JOHN’S COTTAGE—THE FISHING
I have told the reader a little about Sandie’s new master and his landlady, John’s wife, and a glimpse at the cottage itself may not be uninteresting.
John’s residence, then, was what a house-factor would have described as pleasantly situated by the sea-shore, and as far as the situation went he would have been right.
The house itself stood with one of its gables towards the sea, as if it had fallen out with the sea and was giving it the cold shoulder. It was separated from high-water mark by about three square yards of green sward, or, as a recent poet says—
“The sea washing up to the door,
The bay running down to the boat.”
There, of a summer’s evening, John and his wife might have been seen mending their nets or preparing the bait for lobster creels or deep-sea lines. John used to say that there never was any woman whatever who could render bait so tempting to the eye or nose of fish or lobster as his Eppie could, and there must have been a good deal of truth in what he said, for often when fishermen drew in their lines, or drew up their creels empty, John’s draught of fishes would be but a little short of miraculous. In the winter-time, at spring tides the sea used often to despise the boundaries set to it, inundate the bit of green sward, wash the clay from the foundations of the hut, and dash in angry spray over the chimney itself. This east-end chimney had accordingly a very dilapidated appearance, being plastered up with boards, old tarpaulin, and ropes of straw, which, however, were constantly coming to grief, so that John’s constant employment, whenever he had nothing else to do, was to sit cross-legged upon the roof and repair it. The other chimney was quite a respectable affair in comparison.
The front of the little building, however, was quite a picture of neatness and cleanliness. The causeway in front of it was always swept and tidy, for Eppie made it a law that neither murlin nor creel should lie about her door. She had a small hut for all such gear, and there they were placed when not in use.
In the front side of John’s house were a door and two small windows, from which statement the reader may easily infer that the accommodation consisted only of two rooms, “a butt and a ben.” And the amount of whitewash expended every month on both the outside walls and the inside must have been something very considerable indeed.